The Villager, created by journalism students and staff of Stevenson University, is a website in which articles and reviews about current and past campus events are written and published to inform multiple audiences related to the school. These audiences include current and past students, parents of those students and faculty of the university. The content that the website provides utilizes a multimodal organization that offers a variety of affordances to its readers for simple navigation and comprehension.
Visual Mode
The use of pictures placed on top of a white background draws the audience’s attention to them, which give a visual representation of what the review would describe if clicked on. The font chosen for the website remains uniform for most of the links, including variations with color and size in the titles and the top and side navigation bars. The layout of these pictures and titles either lie within the picture itself or is displayed as a caption below, both areas providing links to the article. This affords multiple ways to reach reviews on different topics while not being too harsh on the eyes of the audience to read through titles and information.
Spatial Mode
The layout of these pictures and titles either lie within the picture itself or is displayed as a caption below, both areas providing links to the article. The white space between each topic of writing separates the text and prevents captions and pictures from overlapping and causing any visual confusion. The affordance to this style of layout allows the audience to read and navigate the site easily, especially when looking for a specific topic. However, the amount of links and articles that can be viewed at one time on a screen can be slightly overwhelming, mostly evident on the front page.
Gestural Mode
The chosen pictures contributes facial expressions and body language that can seem inviting and prompt the reader to click on the link. Also, the portraits of the writers, editors and subjects gives the site a more personal touch, and combined with text makes the articles feel more like a conversation than a news report.
Linguistic Mode
The language used in the articles and the titles of the site is very simplistic and easy to comprehend. Although slang and complex academic-style words are not used in this form of informal writing, the affordance of this is that the language allows the audience to passively read through the articles without having to constantly pause and search the meaning of a word.
Aural Mode
The Villager uses video clips of interviews and sport events that incorporates a more vocal way of reporting news in contrast to utilizing only words in other articles. However, there are very few and require some searching to locate.
The layout of Stevenson University’s The Villager includes a multitude of ways to connect and stay in contact with on-campus news. The use of the visual, gestural, linguistic, aural, and spatial modes combined together allows the site to be easily navigable with the use of pictures, captions and navigation bars to ensure the audience is able to find what they would like to read. Although this website has positive and some negative affordances, overall it effectively provides useful information catered to anyone in affiliation with the university.
